5 Mistakes To Avoid On Social Media If You Value Your Online Reputation.

The Internet has now been around long enough that former teenagers who are in the job market are sometimes seeing the affects that poor choices made in the past can wreak on the present.

Teachers, lawyers, politicians are also not immune to the far reaching implications of having made poor choices publically can have on them. As a small business owner, you’re in the same boat. It’s important to use social media carefully to enhance your business reputation.

Not Keeping Personal & Business Separate

This is getting more difficult as the days of being anonymous on the net are over. Today, everyone is known via Google, and you have to sign in via Google or Facebook or other methods thereby verifying your identity in order to participate in online discussions. But, it’s important that you keep your personal life and business life as separate as possible. If you use the Internet to market your business, you’re probably going to have to limit your online personal life to a select group of people as well as a select social network such as Facebook.

Over sharing on Social Media

Everyone doesn’t need to know every detail about your life. Is it really smart to share pictures of yourself in your underwear, even to your husband or boyfriend? You never know when you will get hacked and that private information is out there for the world to see. In addition, while you want to be a real person to your audience they really don’t need to know the intimate details of your menstrual cycle or hormone fluctuations or bathroom habits of your children. Naturally, this depends on your niche, but for the most part, don’t over share, it’s not attractive.

Not Being Consistent

One way to manage your online reputation is to keep your brand consistent across all accounts. Use similar or the same headshots, use the same logos, and banners, the same colors and the same information about yourself and your business. By inadvertently leaving something out you might accidentally confuse someone or make them think you’re being less than honest. Even if it’s an accident, you don’t know how others will view it. Double check to make sure that everything you say and do backs up who you want to represent yourself as online.

Not Researching Yourself

You can use a variety of tools for monitoring your online reputation such as Google Alerts, TweetBeep, and others will help you manage your online presence so that you are the one dictating what people know rather than others dictating it for you. You can find out what’s being said about your brand, your name, and your products or even similar products and services so that you can stay ahead of the buzz and even create the buzz.

Not Updating Privacy Settings

Most social media accounts offer some privacy options. A great way to manage your privacy on Facebook is to set up a closed and private group for your friends and family that you trust so that nothing can be searched or discovered that is personal or embarrassing. Facebook also offers other privacy options like the ability to approve images you’re tagged in. Use these options to get the most out of social media and protect yourself and your business from misunderstandings.

Every day there is something in the news about someone who said something taken out of context or said in jest that gets someone into a lot of trouble to where they lose jobs, clients, and even an entire business. Don’t become a statistic.

How To Cash In On The Holiday Season

Just because you have a small online business doesn’t mean you can’t cash in during the holiday season with special offers, discounts, sales and / or coupons.

Why not do all of the above?

People are going to be distracted during the holidays with buying gifts so unless you sell gifts, you’re going to need to be super inventive to get people to part with their hard earned cash during the holiday season.

Make An Offer They Can’t Refuse

Create a sale that is so good that they can’t refuse. Add a special holiday code to all your products that make them so inexpensive that they feel like if they don’t buy them now they’ll miss out. This is really easy if you have digital products because you’ve already spent the money on creating them. It costs you nothing to sell them cheaply, all pure profit.

Make The Offer Time Sensitive

Create a feeling of urgency in their need to buy your product by making the offer very time sensitive. “Get this price only for the next 24 hours for Cyber Monday!” Make it clear that they won’t see this offer again, this inexpensively and stick to your word about that. If the deal is that good they won’t pass it up.

Use Their Emotions

Use words that will pull emotions from your viewers. Acknowledge that they’re busy shopping for everyone else. If your items aren’t especially gift items, and you can’t figure out how to make them gift items, then why not present them as gifts to the self. Gifts they deserve to buy for themselves. Tell them why this is a good purchase and make them feel good about doing it.

Create a Special Sales Page

Don’t skimp out just because you’re having a huge sale, create a sales page that is just as good as you’d normally create for your items. Even though you’re planning on selling things so inexpensively it makes you cringe a bit, this is an important event and should be treated as such. If you don’t market your event as well as you would other events then you won’t get the page views and you won’t make enough sales to make up for the cheap price.

Tie The Offer to Charity

Finally, a great way to get your customers’ attention is to tie the sale to raising money for a charity. Pick a charity everyone can easily get behind, something that is non political and helpful to people. This is where it’s important to know your audience well. You could even have a contest leading up to the sale about which charity to support.

By making the offer super good, time limited, emotional and special you will break through their will not to buy anything during the holidays. They won’t want to miss out on this once a year opportunity to buy your products and / or services. You won’t want to miss out on the opportunity to cash in during the holiday season.

Email Marketing Trends That Never Go Out of Style

Some people have been saying that email marketing is dead. But, nothing could be further from the truth. Email marketing is here to stay and more popular than ever. When someone says “the money’s in the list” they’re not joking. Collecting email addresses from your target audience is an essential part of marketing.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a sole proprietor working from home as an Internet Marketer or you have a bricks and mortar business. Email marketing is a way to raise your revenue and in fact, it’s a way to give yourself a raise anytime you feel like it with smart marketing techniques. Let’s go over some email marketing tends that never go out of style.

User Engagement — When someone signs up for your email list, they’re not a customer yet. They’re a potential customer. It’s imperative that you find a way to engage them. Encourage your email recipients to ask questions of you, answer polls, and interact with you. Use email to point out little known facts about your products and services that might not be apparent at first. Set these messages up on an auto responder so that a new potential customer is learning about various features of your products and / or services over time.

Delivering Relevant Content is an Imperative — Content is never going to go out of style in pretty much all forms. Email content needs to be relevant, focused, and targeted just like the rest of your content, and even more so. You are writing content for a very specific audience when you write content for email marketing messages. Know your audience, and know what type of content they want, then deliver it without fail.

Treat Email Recipients How You’d Like to Be Treated — You know exactly how you want to be treated when you sign up for someone’s email marketing list. You want to be respected, you want to receive the information promised on the days that were promised. Your email recipients are potential customers or actual customers and need to be treated as such. If you have consent to send emails, send them, personalize them, and respect the recipient.

Market Segmentation Never Goes Out of Style — It is essential that you use an email list provider that allows for market segmentation. List segmentation is going to help you get better open rates, better click through rates, and better response rates. When you segment your list, you’ll send specialized messages to each separate list making your email marketing campaigns more relevant to the recipient. Segmenting improves results exponentially.

Mobile Optimization is Essential — Today, many people are reading their email from a mobile device. It’s important that you realize that and optimize your email for mobile readers. Any links you want the recipient to click should take them to a mobile optimized area too. Nothing can be more disappointing to try to click something or buy something from your mobile device and you can’t. Most people will not wait until they get home to their PC’s to complete the transaction. It’ll just be a lost transaction.

These email marketing trends never go out of style because they are imperative marketing actions that need to be taken today. By focusing on user engagement through relevant content sent to the right person at the right time that your market can answer anywhere will enable you to see a large improvement return on investment.

On-Site SEO involves manually optimizing every page on your website, from its title tag, keywords used within content to the way that your site map or overall structure is created.

All of the work of on-site Seo takes place directly on your website, and is in your full control. When it comes to on-site SEO, there are very important factors regarding the actual structure and anatomy of your website that you need to pay special attention to in order to effectively optimize your website for top search engine rankings:

1. Keywords

2. Title Tags ( per page)

3. Meta Description

4. Site Map Inclusion

Title Tags

A title tag should include a description of what your website is about, rather than just including your website’s URL, you should always incorporate your primary keyword phrase into the title tags of each webpage you own.

Head Tags

Header Tags also play an important part in search engine optimization, because by using head tags within your website’s content, you are able to highlight important text on your website, ensuring that search engine spiders pay special attention to the text contained within these head tags.

Site Maps

Another very important element to SEO is including a site map on your website. What a site map does is helps both visitors and search engine spiders navigate their way throughout your pages and categories, by outlining all of the different areas of your site.

When it comes to developing your content so that you are optimizing your website for the search engines, you should pay attention to keyword proximity, prominence as well as the order of your content itself. The prominence of your keyword is based on the first instance of where it appears within your content.

A keyword phrase that is used at the end of your content will be considered less relevant than a keyword phrase that appears in the first portion of your content or article.

This means that you need to ensure that you implement your primary keyword phrases into the first half of your content, so that it is given more weight when search engine spiders index your website.

Keyword proximity is also very important in terms of search engine rankings because it indicates to the search engines that these keywords are related to one another.

Off Site SEO Traffic Tips

With off-site SEO, you are focusing on building solid back links to your website, as the more incoming links to your site from quality, relevant websites, the more authority your website is given in the search engines.

Place emphasis on the quality of your incoming backlinks rather than the quantity of backlinks you have. While the more backlinks in circulation, the better, if you have more backlinks coming in from solid, established and authority websites, they WILL carry more weight than those pointing to your site from start-up websites and blogs.

You also want to try to create a backlink campaign that has ONE WAY backlinks, where you are not required to provide a reciprocal link, as it will add more value to the backlinks pointing to your site.

Directory Backlinks

With online directories, you can add your website into specific categories and instantly establish back links to your website, just be careful not to over-do it!

Here are the top 10 social bookmarking websites for generating fresh back links to your site. All of these contain DO follow, ensuring links leading to your website will count within the search engines as a valid back link:

It’s also important to use anchor text within your blog comments, especially if you want to rank for various keyword phrases.

Final Tips

Remain Consistent! In order to maximize the performance of all of your traffic campaigns you need to stay consistent, adding fresh new content to your websites and consistently maximizing exposure so you keep the momentum going!

Create squeeze and landing pages that will help you leverage your traffic by building targeted lists of subscribers.

That way, you can send out broadcasts and follow up emails with additional affiliate products as well as an equal balance of fresh, high quality content.

Take action and work towards consistently expanding your outreach by implementing additional traffic strategies, and expanding on your existing ones.